<p>Trader’s personality is very different than in sales. Fit in this case is very important.</p>
<p>My brother was in FI sales for 20 years, a top producer for his firm. His best friend ran a trading desk, graduate of MIT engineering. He is an introvert, a man of very few words. He was speaking with my sister-in-law, a stay at home mom, who buys and sell a lot on Ebay. They got into a discussion on her strategy of bidding on eBay. She said she would never fall in love with any item, and there is always a cap for her, never get too greedy or emotional. My brother’s friend, out of the blue, offered to train her as a trader because he felt she had the right personality for it (he has only made that offer to a very few people). My brother was quite offended because he has asked his friend to train him over the years. The friend said, “you get too emotional, and to trade you need to have a cool head with no ego.”</p>
<p>There was an article about what kind of personality you need to do different types work in ibanking - Trader, sales, investment banker, structurer, researcher… </p>
<p>Almost any major would be good for trading, but CS is very good. Most trading is very high tech now. Traders that could communicate well with their IT support, or could do some simple programming to manage their books is very valuable to a team. Many top programmers in my days have gone into trading - the reason being they had to understand trader’s hedge strategy, risk calculations better than anyone in order to develop an efficient trading system. I would do CS, engineering, and a lot of finance courses.</p>
<p>This is a bit of rambling, but I don’t know if S&T is good to get into for the long term. Trading is very high pressured, and many people do get burned out. Other than trading for yourself, there is not much you could do if you were let go, like so many recently. Sales is very sepecific to a sector or region. If you were a top producer Asia covering central banks, it would be hard for you to come back to US or other parts of the world because lack of client list (you are only as good as your client contact). Again, what could you do outside of institutional sales after 10-20 years, what industry would hire you. With many of our friends at age 40+, they are having a hard time to find any backup plan.</p>